Contractors · Plumbers · Electricians · Roofers · HVAC
Web design for trades. Your customer is standing in water.
Trades websites are different from every other kind, and it's because of the person on the other end. A burst pipe. A breaker that keeps tripping. A roof leaking during a storm. Nobody browses a plumber's website. They're in trouble, they're on a phone, and they're calling whoever answers first — which means your site has about four seconds and one job.
Hablo español — toda la información aquí
Sebastian · Vero Beach · Palm Bay · Melbourne · Fort Pierce · Port St. Lucie
First place gets 17.6% of clicks. Third gets 15.1%. Fourth is a cliff.
What a trades site actually needs
Web design for a trades business: five things. Everything else is decoration.
I've read what the trade-specialist agencies say a contractor website needs, and stripped out everything that's really there to justify a bigger invoice. This is the list that survives.
1. Your number, tappable, on every screen
Not in the footer. Not behind a menu. A sticky call bar that follows the page down, because a person standing in an inch of water is not going to hunt for it. If a visitor has to think about how to call you, you've lost the job to whoever was easier.
2. It has to load in under two seconds
On cellular, in a garage, on a phone that's four years old. Not on your office wifi. Google's own research found that a tenth of a second of mobile speed measurably changes conversion — and your visitor is in a worse mood than most.
3. A page for each thing you actually do
Not one "Services" page listing fifteen bullets. Drain cleaning, water heater replacement, repiping, slab leaks — each one its own page, because that's how people search. A remodeler who doesn't appear for "kitchen remodel Vero Beach" is invisible to the highest-intent customer in the county, and one combined services page never ranks for it.
4. Real photos of your real work
Not stock images of models in clean hard hats. Your truck, your crew, jobs you finished. And they need compressing — the typical contractor gallery is a dozen phone photos at 4MB each, which is exactly why the site takes six seconds to load.
5. The towns you cover, named out loud
Google can't infer your service area from your address. If you cover Sebastian, Fellsmere and Micco, those words need to exist on your site and in your Google Business Profile, or you're invisible in two of them and you won't show on Google Maps there at all.
What you don't need
A blog you'll never write. A slider on the homepage. A chatbot. An "About Our Values" page. If you're not going to post at least monthly, don't build a blog — one abandoned post from 2023 looks worse than no blog at all.
Who this is for
Any trade where the customer searches, calls, and books the same day.
The pattern is the same across all of them: someone has a problem, they search on a phone, and they call one of the first three results. The trade changes; the behaviour doesn't.
| Category | Trades |
|---|---|
| Emergency and repair | Plumbers · electricians · HVAC and air conditioning · roofers · garage door repair · locksmiths · water damage and restoration · appliance repair |
| Exterior and grounds | Landscapers · lawn care · tree service · pressure washing · fencing · paving and driveways · hardscaping · pool service and construction · irrigation |
| Building and remodeling | General contractors · home builders · remodeling and additions · concrete · siding · windows and doors · decks and patios · drywall · flooring · painters · handyman services |
| Specialty and service | Pest control · septic · well drilling · solar · screen enclosures · hurricane shutters · marine and dock services · mobile mechanics · junk removal · cleaning services |
If your trade isn't listed, call anyway. The question isn't what you do — it's whether people find you by searching for it. If they do, this works. If your work comes entirely from a builder you've subcontracted for since 2009, it probably doesn't, and I'll say so.
The problem nobody mentions until it happens
Your busiest hour is the hour your website is most likely to fall over.
This is Florida. When a storm comes through, "emergency plumber near me" and "roof leak repair" spike ten times over in a few hours. That is the single most valuable traffic your business will ever get — and it's exactly when a site on cheap hosting gets throttled or goes down.
Cheap hosting is priced for a quiet Tuesday
Shared plans at a few dollars a month work fine until traffic spikes. Then requests get throttled and the site slows or drops — at the exact moment every one of those visitors is ready to pay someone today.
What I build handles the spike
Your site sits on managed infrastructure that scales without you doing anything, with the images optimised and delivered at the right size automatically. There's no maintenance window and no plugin that breaks at the worst moment.
And hurricane season is a search season
Roofers, tree services, electricians, restoration, fence repair. If your listing and your site are ready before the storm, you catch that week. If you fix them after, you've missed it — local search takes months to move.
Measured, not guessed
Whether you can rank on Google Maps depends on your trade. Here are the numbers.
Google Maps ranking data measured across listings on this coast in 2026. The gap between trades is bigger than most people expect, and it should decide what you spend before anything else does.
| Trade | Median reviews on leading listings | Have structured data | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| General contractors Melbourne |
~20 | 100% | The most reachable category measured. Twenty reviews is four months of asking every customer. |
| General contractors Palm Bay |
~33 | 33% | Very winnable on reviews — and two thirds of the leaders have no structured data on their site at all. |
| Electricians Palm Bay |
~45 | 33% | Same open technical gap. Reachable within a year of steady review collection. |
| Electricians Melbourne |
~76 | 100% | Established. The technical side is already handled by the leaders, so reviews are the battleground. |
| Landscaping Melbourne / Palm Bay |
~80–89 | 50–100% | Competitive. Doable, but it's a longer climb and reviews are the whole game. |
Read the contractor rows again. Twenty to thirty-three reviews is not a wall — it's a few months of asking at the end of every job. And in Palm Bay, two out of three leading contractor and electrician listings have no structured data behind their website, which is a technical gap you can close in a day. If you're in one of those trades in that market, this is as open as local search gets.
The part that matters to a lot of contractors here
Construction has more Hispanic-owned businesses than any other sector in America.
And not one web designer on this coast works in Spanish. I checked every one of them in Vero Beach, Sebastian, Palm Bay, Melbourne, Fort Pierce and Port St. Lucie. Not a page, not a line.
Spanish is my first language
The calls, the contract, and the website itself if you want it. No translator, no subcontractor, and no extra charge. If you'd rather do the whole thing in Spanish, we do the whole thing in Spanish.
The contract gets explained line by line
Signing a web design agreement in a second language is how people end up not owning their own domain. I'll go through it with you before you sign, in whichever language you'd rather read it in.
And your site can serve both
Plenty of contractors here quote in Spanish and English depending on the customer. Your website can do the same, written properly in both rather than run through a translator. Más información en español.
There are trade specialists out there
Some of them are good. Here's how to compare us fairly.
There are agencies built entirely for contractors, and one of them does affordable trade-ready sites quickly. I'm not going to pretend they don't exist. But there's a trade-off in how they do it, and four questions sort all of us out.
Will my site look like every other contractor's?
The affordable trade agencies work from proven templates, which is why they're fast and cheap — and the documented drawback is that your site ends up looking very similar to the other contractors using them. I hand-write the pages, so yours doesn't.
Can I see every price without a call?
Websites from $800. Monthly plans from $100. Google profile setup on its own for $300, one time. Every number is on the site with a buy button next to it, same for everyone.
How do you handle service area pages, my Google profile, schema and citations?
That's the question the trade buyer guides tell you to ask, and they're right — if those words produce blank stares, keep looking. All four are in what I do, and the checklist I use is published free on this site.
Can I see the keyword map before you build?
The buyer guides for this niche say a reputable designer produces a keyword map before design begins — target terms per page, with search volume and difficulty. They also list the red-flag answers: "we research what your competitors use," "industry best practices," "we put keywords in your titles." I'll show you the actual list of what each page is built to rank for, before I build anything.
Who owns it if I leave?
Your domain in your name, every login handed over in writing, no fee to leave, no contract. Ask any agency that question and watch how long the answer takes.
What you own
If you ever leave, you take everything with you.
The most common complaint about the big website companies isn't price or design. It's finding out — at the worst possible moment — that the site they paid for was never theirs. I put it in writing instead, in English or Spanish.
Ask me anything before you commit- Your domain is registered in your name. Not mine. It always was yours.
- You get every login. Hosting, Google, analytics, email — handed over, written down.
- No contract to escape. Monthly plans are month to month.
- No fee to leave. No transfer fee, no release fee, no ransom on your own website.
Pricing
Web design pricing for trades, published like everything else.
Most single-truck operations need the $800 build and the $300 monthly plan, and nothing else. If you already have a site that isn't ringing the phone, start with the redesign page instead — and if the site is fine and the listing is the problem, that's a different job and it's cheaper.
| What most trades need | Price | What's in it |
|---|---|---|
| Google profile only | $300 one time |
Your Google Business Profile done properly — categories researched against whoever outranks you, every service written out, hours, service areas, photos. If your site is fine, start here. |
| Starter build | $800 | Three pages of web design, mobile-first, sticky call button, real photos optimised, and your Google Business Profile set up and connected. |
| Professional build | $1,500 | Five to seven pages — a page for each service you actually sell — lead forms, schema markup, and full local SEO across the towns you cover. |
| Local Visibility plan | $300/mo | Hosting that survives a storm, updates, backups, changes, ongoing local SEO, reviews requested and answered, listings kept consistent, and an honest monthly report. Cancel any month. |
Questions
What contractors ask me.
I get all my work from referrals. Why do I need this?
You might not, and if referrals genuinely fill your calendar, keep your money. But referrals don't reach the person whose water heater died at 6am who has never heard of you, and they don't reach anyone who moved here last month — and on this coast that's thousands of people a year. That's the job the map does.
What's the cheapest thing that actually helps?
Finishing your Google Business Profile and asking every customer for a review. Both free, and between them they're most of the result. The full checklist is on this site with no email required. If you'd rather not do it yourself, setup is $300 once, no plan.
Can I rank for emergency searches?
Those are the most competitive terms in the trades and they're decided largely by proximity and reviews. What helps most is being genuinely open when you say you're open, having a phone that gets answered, and steady review volume. A website alone won't win them.
¿Podemos hacer todo esto en español?
Sí, todo — las llamadas, el contrato y la página si usted quiere. El español es mi primer idioma y no cuesta nada extra. Aquí está toda la información.
How long before it does anything?
Adding services to your Google profile can move rankings in 24 to 72 hours. Fixing a wrong category usually moves within days. Reviews take two to three months to compound. Expect real, visible movement in three to six months — anyone promising faster is guessing.
Which towns do you cover?
Sebastian, Vero Beach, Fellsmere, Palm Bay, Melbourne, Fort Pierce and Port St. Lucie, plus everything between. I'll drive an hour without thinking about it.
Free, takes about ten minutes
Tell me your trade and your town.
I'll check what the leading listings in your category actually have — how many reviews, what's on their profiles, what's missing from yours — and tell you honestly whether it's winnable. If it is, I'll tell you what to fix first. If it isn't, I'll tell you that instead.